07 - ORANGE
She is four years old when she learns to love fire. It's winter in District Six, the first one she'll remember by the time she's old enough for the Games. The District is bleak all year round, but in the winter the dreary gray skies get heavier and the smoke in the air gets thicker. The entire season can go by without a glimpse of the sun, the never-ending mass of smog greedily keeping all of the light for itself. And then there's the cold. The cold pervades everything, seeping its way through whatever thin wooden walls and moth-eaten wool blankets the people of Six try to seek warmth in. Throughout the rest of the year, drugs or hunger or the gang wars hit the District hardest, but during the winter, most people die from the cold. Many people can't afford to buy an apartment, huddling in masses in the gutters or burying themselves in dumpsters in a desperate attempt for warmth. No one has any charity to give; every apartment is already cramped to capacity, every family hoping they have enough crumbs and strong enough walls to keep the cold from claiming one of their own. There are bodies in the alleys and even the main streets every day, bodies bloated blue and purple with stiff fingers and glassy eyes. Peacekeepers in their thick heated suits from the Capitol clear them every night, kicking every corpse that lies on the sides of the roads to see if they're alive or not before throwing them into the back of their jalopies. The rumor is that the Peacekeepers take the bodies back to the Justice Building and use them as fuel for the Mayor's expensive Capitol heating system, letting the bodies burn to glowing orange cinders in the incinerator. Others claim that the people in the Carousel taxidermy them and put them in their lawns as decoration, laughing at their new, grotesquely bloated statues. Whatever really happens to the bodies is inconsequential, though, just an urban legend thrown between teenagers on the brink of hypothermia in the hopes its terror might warm them enough to survive the night. For many of them, it's not enough, and the bodies always pile up night after night in every street of Six.
While winter is always rough in Six, the winter of her fourth year of life becomes infamous afterwards as one of absolute horror. When the blizzards come in mid-November, they seem to never stop all the way till March, with feet-high drifts filling every street and making it nearly impossible for anyone to get to work. There's food shortages across the country after the agrarian Districts missed their quotas earlier in the year, and the pain is strongest in Six. The year before, Mercedes had won her Games and brought back light and, more importantly, the monthly Parcel Days that allowed almost no one to starve. The District came to lean on those bright orange crates, pulled from trains and dropped by jets so that everyone in the District could get something. But now another Hunger Games has come and gone. Mercedes is no longer the newest Victor, a flashy Career claiming that title yet again. Their already healthy District receives extra dessert and snacks for a year while Six is plunged right back into the bitter cold and relentless starvation. There are worries there won't be enough people to man the factories when they reopen to full capacity in the early spring, and worries that there's too many emaciated, frozen corpses to count buried under the drifts of snow.
It's in this horrific year that Indigo almost dies for the first time. While her mother is less than two years away from her death from overdose, usually bed-bound by her addiction, the winter forces her to give up her habit enough to feed herself and her child. Her father stops hitting them as well, opting to huddle close to them in a flimsy truce in order to conserve heat. Still, they are poor, and neither of her parents has been able to keep work this winter. The only reason they have a roof over their heads still is due to her maternal grandparents' inheritance, mostly drained to morphling dealers now but with just enough left to let them stay inside the apartment till spring. Still, they have to sell everything else to pay rent: Indigo's few toys, their blankets, their extra clothes, the furniture, even their bed. They sleep on the ice-cold hardwood floors on top of one another, shaking so much from the frozen air that they never seem to be still, even in their sleep. Her fingers turn blue and her breath is always a cloud in front of her face, and when she manages to cry quiet enough so that her father doesn't hear, the tears freeze before they can run down her cheeks. The mood is of tense anger and fear, her mother moaning through withdrawal and her father crackling with so much pent up rage he's like a dam about to burst. Yet they keep themselves contained, huddling around their daughter in a desperate attempt to keep themselves alive, the animal instincts within them brought to the surface by the bitter cold and overriding whatever the human parts of their brain desire.
It's early January when the snow and the cold gets so bad that Indigo thinks she's going to die, even though she's only four years old and doesn't completely understand what that means. She's seen glimpses of the Games on the TV when her father is at work and her mother is high, and once her family walked near a gang fight and she saw someone fall down with bloody bullet holes riddling their dark orange jacket. She thinks it feels like that, the cold making holes in her skin, and she thinks of the Games before Mercedes's even though she doesn't really know what they are, thinking of the snowy alpine forest and the children quivering under piles of snow, their bodies purple and blue. She feels like them, and she knows that's bad, that she shouldn't feel like the doomed kids on the TV or the wild kids who run in the dark alleyways.
It's early January, and they're out of food and almost out of time. Her mother can barely move, her soupy perception of the world turned to absolute incoherence by the chill that sinks deep into the marrow of her bones. Her father isn't faring much better, and it's the only time Indigo has seen him unguarded in her entire life, that winter when they almost froze to death. Just once, when he thinks they are both asleep, Indigo watches as he crawls over to the one greasy window in their apartment, looking out through the small pockets not blanketed in snow. She hears him sniffle and knows tears are dripping down his face. When she gets older, she realizes he was crying for himself and not for her, but tears are tears, and her father never cried. Indigo knew she was going to swell purple and blue like the kids on the TV then, because her father wouldn't cry unless something terrifying like that was going to happen to them.
Her father gets up that next morning and whispers that he's going to leave the house. Her mother flies into hysterics at that, clawing at Indigo's father and begging him to stay inside from whatever her hazy nightmares tell her waits for him in the snow. However, they haven't eaten in two days, and the cold is so consuming that Indigo's fingers haven't bent in a week. The fear and self-preservation that softened her father enough for him to actually take care of Indigo and her mother for once in his life leads him to pry his wife off of him, delicately kiss Indigo on the head while she shakes in fear, and walk out of the apartment and into the cold hell awaiting him outside. Her mother begins to cry as if he's already dead, while Indigo's mind grinds to a halt from the shock of him showing her any genuine affection. By the time her mind thaws, however, her body is still freezing and her mother is still crying, so Indigo lays back down and cries as well, convinced her father looks like the kids on the TV by now.
When he comes back an hour later, he looks more purple than the pale white he usually is, with a bleeding gash on his forehead. Her mother doesn't stop crying when he returns, now tangled in some nightmarish vision from her withdrawal and having lost contact with reality. However, Indigo runs to him and wraps herself around his legs, relief flooding her veins. Her father awkwardly pats her on the head but does not push her away, clinging her body close to him to provide himself some semblance of warmth. When she lets go, she looks up to see what is in his hands, and discovers all he has managed to find are a few cans of soup and a shiny metal barrel the size of his head. Disappointment fills her chest, and something inside of her makes her want to lay down and close her eyes for a long, long time.
However, before little Indigo can turn away, her father crouches on the ground and starts rotating a small metal ring on the side of the little barrel. Indigo watches in shock as a small flame rises out of the barrel, orange and flickering and hot, hotter than the days when the rich kids in the Carousel get ice cream cones to lick at. Her mother stops wailing behind them, drawn to the flame like a bug, and the three of them crouch around the little device her father has stolen and let its artificial heat warm their bodies and take them back from the brink of death.
"I stole it from a Carousel man visiting the market," her father murmurs once the flame has loosened his frozen body enough for him to talk. Indigo's mother doesn't hear, her eyes focused hypnotically on the flames, but Indigo gets scared again. She's only four but she knows that when people steal things, the Peacekeepers come and someone gets hurt. While her mother stares intently at the flames for hours in silence, Indigo and her father stare at the door waiting for it to burst open and for the Peackeepers in their padded, heated suits to point guns in their faces. But night comes, and their door does not get beat down. The little Capitol machine lets them be warm enough that they can move all their limbs and actually start feeling like humans again.
Their little truce holds around the little barrel of artificial orange fire until the last snow melts outside and spring has finally arrived. Her father manages to get a job in the factories, and they sell the little contraption on the black market so they can buy a new mattress and blankets. Her old life before the great freeze returns with a vengeance; her father's fists hit harder and more often, seemingly to make up for lost time, and her mother never leaves the bed once they get it back. However, for her entire childhood, whenever Indigo feels cold or lonely or lost, she thinks of that little flame burning in the stolen machine that saved her life and feels comforted enough to keep crawling along.
She is sixteen years old when she learns to hate fire. She's in the middle of the Forty-First Annual Hunger Games, still in the sweltering jungle, and no one's died in a handful of days. It's been at least a week or two since she got here, maybe even three. She knows she should know the exact number; there's nothing to do in this arena but hide and sweat and kill. She should be able to keep track of the simple number of days she's been here, but how long it's been doesn't really matter because she's still here, and however many days it's been isn't going to change a thing about that. There is one number she knows, though: seven. There's seven other tributes left in this goddamn jungle with her. It's a number she couldn't forget if she tried; seven more beating hearts out here in the jungle with her, waiting to kill her like she's waiting to kill them. She knows they'll all have to stop beating if she wants to go home, that she's already stopped two hearts on her own in this godforsaken rainforest, but she chooses not to think about that. Instead she sits in the same tree she's been in since she murdered the boy from Two, her sponsor parachutes clustered around her hips all the way down to her feet. She muses about how many days it's been since she rose up on her pedestal, knowing that thinking about how she's become a child murderer is just going to make the indeterminable time pass slower.
It's dawn and she's half awake when she smells the smoke. She blearily clears her eyes, trying to snap herself out of the half-lucid trance she's been in, thinking about the Two boy swelling up yellow at the base of her tree. In her head, the Three boy turns towards her with fearful eyes, his bright orange jacket standing out starkly against the dark green of the jungle. As Indigo pulls herself out of the central boughs of the tree and looks outside, she thinks she's still half-asleep and seeing the Three boy before she killed him, because she only sees orange in front of her when she glances out between the leaves. But then she feels the searing heat, roaring like an inferno in her face as it crackles feet from her tree, and she knows she's not dreaming, she's not dreaming at all.
She barely has time to grab her pack and her blowpipe before the jungle fire is licking at the branches of her tree, the waxy green leaves going up instantly as if they've been soaked in gasoline. She leaves the half-eaten pile of sponsor gifts and her sleeping bag behind, desperate to take as much as she can but also knowing she's going to have to run as fast as she possibly can to avoid getting burned to a crisp. She hears the metal canisters and their silvery parachutes go up in flames with loud pops and hisses as she lands on the ground. Her knees ache from the jump, but she doesn't stop to wince. The plants all around her are on fire, the towers of roiling orange flame devouring every tree, bush, and vine that clogs the area around her. The fire is the color of a ripe orange's peel, and she swears it has a bit of a sheen to it too. It's not a pretty sheen though, not like opals or the silver frame of a handheld mirror. No, it's like the sheen of the jalopies she'd build back home in Six, knowing they would be used to destroy and terrorize every corner of Panem. It's like the sheen of Caesar's coiffed wigs or her prep team's unnaturally colored skin. The sheen betrays how artificial and destructive the fire is, how its glowing orange beauty is just a shell for pure greed, and that thought just makes Indigo run even faster as the flames lap at her heels.
She can barely form coherent thoughts as she sprints through the jungle for what feels like hours and very well could be. The beast is monstrous within her, but her reasoning mind is able to still function in between its roars for survival. It makes sense they'd send something after her; she did kill a Career all on her own, but she's done nothing after that but eat and hide, and only a few kids have died since then. The Capitol must have gotten bored, and when they get bored, they get vicious, just like a toddler turning nasty with their dress-up dolls when they're tired of changing their clothes. The idea of Claudius Templesmith gleefully tearing the limbs off of a doll and Caesar Flickerman setting it on fire makes her legs pump faster. The way the fire is so close to her also does the trick, so near that it almost feels like her hair's on fire.
One reach behind her head, and she realizes that her head actually is on fire. She's barely made a peep the whole Games, so accustomed to violence and terror throughout her life living with her father that nothing could shake a real scream out of her. Her hair being on fire does it, though. She's never experienced anything like it in her life, the way the orange flames eat her dark tresses away like a pile of dry twigs, the foul smell that fills up her nostrils, the way her body screeches for her to do something before her skull catches flame too. A scream of pure, unbridled terror and confusion works its way out of her lungs as she stumbles to the ground and swats at her hair, trying desperately to put out the fire, the beast too stunned to keep her from falling to the jungle floor.
She pulls open her pack and dumps an entire water bottle on her head, screaming again in relief this time as the fire hisses away. Her hair is short and uneven now, the fire having almost licked her scalp, but she doesn't have time to stop and examine it because the fire has kept raging around her. Her hair might be safe now, but she's really in the fire now, almost nowhere to run, and she continues to scream as she jumps over burning logs and rushes through flaming flanks of grass because she won't die now, not after killing two boys and sitting in a tree so long she can't remember the days it's been since she got here.
She forgets what happens after that, even as she's experiencing it. Her mind goes to such a basic, animalistic state that there is no capacity for understanding or long-term memory, just survival. The beast takes over completely, in such a way that there's no way for her human brain to really remember everything that happened. She just remembers the heat of the fire on her back, a couple burning vines almost swinging her down, the feeling of the flames being so close that her skin started to pucker and ripple like melting wax. It's all a mix, though, and she doesn't know if that all happened before her hair was on fire or after. The only thing during her run from the flames that the beast makes sure she remembers are the cannons, two of them. The beast doesn't register what that means, just that there's been a loud noise, and that Indigo would care about what those loud noises meant. But otherwise, the beast takes control of her and makes her legs run until they feel like blocks of acid and then makes her keep running after that, running and running and running until the two loud noises have happened, the flames fall back, and the heavens open up with torrential rain.
Indigo collapses in a clearing, dropping her pack and blowpipe next to her and moaning in relief as the soft grasses cushion her fall. The beast immediately falls away, exhausted from its extended stay as her protector, leaving her human self stunned and vulnerable. Thunder booms and lightning cracks throughout the arena as the water pours down violently. If it were any other situation, Indigo would curse such cold, unrelenting rain that feels like bullets piercing her skin. However, the freezing rain soothes her boiling burns and massages her singed scalp, and she weeps in relief as it drowns the arena in its watery mercy. When she gathers her wits enough, she sits up and watches as the brashly orange jungle fire shrinks and then balloons rebelliously before shrinking again as the rain beats it back, roaring at the storm clouds like a circus lion being forced back into its cage. She watches as the miles of orange flames are tamed and subdued by the pounding rain until all she can see is a sea of soaked ash on one side of her, and what remains of the jungle on the other. She stares at the never-ending plains of ash that was once a thriving jungle, and then glances down at the painful red burns covering her arms and legs. A powerful sensory memory of her hair being on fire and her skin feeling like molten wax sears her brain, making her entire body begin to shake. Instead of screaming, she just sits in the rain and lets it soak her to the bone, deciding she'd rather be cold forever than to feel the heat of a fire like that on her skin ever again. She focuses on the cold rain on her ruined skin and the fact that there's only five other hearts left in this arena as opposed to the seven this morning, willing her own heart to keep beating longer than all the rest.
She is forty-nine years old when she learns to love fire again. It's the year of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games, and she's sitting in a box overlooking the promenade with the rest of the Mentors, awaiting the Tribute Parade. All twenty-three of them sit there as the hundreds of thousands of Capitolites below in the bleacher seats are already screaming and clapping although none of the chariots have pulled out of the Tribute Center yet. The Career Victors poke fun at each other in hushed tones, while Brandy, Chaff, and Haymitch behind them are raucously drinking. Dirk sits next to Indigo, his hands in hers as he narrows his eyes at everything around them. Indigo understands how he feels; the vibrant colors and bright lights and utter cacophony of the Capitol is unnerving, and it's even worse during the Parade. She wishes for the chariots to come soon so she and Dirk can escape this before one of them loses it like they tend to do every now and again.
Eventually the timpani begin to boom and the crowd noise rises to a crescendo as the first chariot rolls out onto the promenade. The Ones are glowing like always, but Indigo doesn't really pay attention, the sparkling boys and girls from the District reminding her too much of Cordial from her Games and the state she found her in after the roaring orange jungle fire. Indigo pushes that memory away before it can linger, instead watching as chariot after chariot rolls out until Six's comes into sight. It's nothing memorable; Attila has long retired, replaced by someone she honestly has never learned the name of, and she can't even make out what the costumes are supposed to be besides the fact they're gold. Indigo knows her girl, Marlee, is shaking like a leaf down there, and she just sighs at the thought. The girl's got a learning disability and is even more emaciated than most of her tributes, and Indigo knows it's just another year of watching her charge get cut down at the Bloodbath like a pig at the slaughterhouse.
Indigo is ready to leave once the last chariot rolls out onto the promenade, wanting to get back to the Tribute Hotel before Marlee so she can comfort her and then shoot up a vial to get to sleep. However, her eyes are drawn instantly to the last chariot as the crowd begins to go wild. She watches in shock as the District Twelve tributes, usually dressed in dingy miner's costumes, ride out in skin-tight black outfits that ripple with fire. The orange flames crackle all over them, and she knows it must be meant to resemble the District's product, coal, being burnt for fuel. She never imagined such a thing could look so beautiful, but it makes her jaw drop open. She expects the sight of the fire burning all over two teenagers to frighten her, but she's oddly entranced as she watches Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark ride down the promenade hand and hand as they burn brighter than all the other tributes. From behind her, she can hear Haymitch's pleased laughter as the crowd screams for his tributes, and Indigo knows it's finally his year to bring one home.
Marlee is always her first responsibility, but Indigo has a bad habit of thinking a lot about the tributes from Twelve before the Games begin. When Katniss gets an 11 at training, Indigo knows she's going to win, a small smile working her way onto her face at the idea as she comforts Marlee over her score of 4. When Peeta declares his love for Katniss at the Interviews, Indigo's heart swells despite the fact she's never been the romantic type. On the last day before the Games, holding a sobbing Marlee in her arms, Indigo hopes with all her might that one of the Twelves come back if Marlee dies, knowing deep down that this crying little thing in her arms doesn't stand anywhere near as much of a chance as the Girl on Fire and her lover.
Marlee dies at the Bloodbath like Indigo knew she would, but Katniss and Peeta make it out alive and keep surviving and surviving and surviving. All throughout, the hysteria over the star-crossed lovers is at a fever pitch in the Capitol, everything about the Girl on Fire this and the Boy with the Bread that. Fire is all the rage in fashion all of the sudden, but it doesn't frighten Indigo like it would've before. Instead, she watches as the Capitolites practically set themselves on fire for a girl from the Seam that hates them so much. Indigo knows the look in Katniss's eyes so well that she swears she's watching herself if she'd been given a different body and a different family at a different time. The way she runs through the forest and desperately shoots her arrows with deadly accuracy reminds her too much of her firing poisoned darts from her blowpipe, but it doesn't make her cower. She stays relatively lucid the whole Games, oddly enraptured enough by Katniss and Peeta's survival to stay away from her vials for a week at a time. She watches and watches, her heart soaring for Katniis and beating fast for Peeta, and when they win she cheers almost as loudly as Haymitch and Effie in the Control Center.
At night on the train back to Six, Indigo dreams of a rippling inferno not much different from the one that consumed the jungle in her Games. Instead of embodying the terror she felt back when she was sixteen years old and doomed to die, the blaze takes on the comforting qualities of the little flame that saved her life the winter she was four years old. She watches as it surrounds the edges of the Capitol and burns it all to the ground, the orange flames roasting every painted person who has ever laughed at the slaughter of her little girls to ash. Once the entire place is burned to the ground, the fire dissipates until there is only a tiny flickering bit left, and Indigo cups it in her palms reverently. In her dreams, Indigo smiles softly at the fire that Katniss Everdeen has lit, stroking it in her hands and knowing the true potential that crackles in her grasp.
A/N: Long time no see y'all! I'm so sorry that this chapter took forever to get out. I wrote a couple others besides this one over the past few months, but I either wanted to save them for later on towards the end or I felt a need to rework them because they weren't strong enough in my opinion. I've just been crazy busy with school and personal problems, but I really want to finish this story because I love Indigo and this concept. I hope you guys liked this chapter and please let me know what you think, any reviews would be greatly appreciated!
Until Next Time,
Tracee